Portrait of the Stadholder Frederik Hendrik (1584-1647), Prince of Orange

c. 1670

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 124.5 cm × width 100.5 cm

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: I. Verslype / Z. Benders, RMA, 25 May 2009

Conservation

Instituut Collectie Nederland: probably partially cleaned

Provenance

…; ? first recorded in the collection of Willem V, and listed in the ‘roode kamer’ in the Stadhouderlijk Hof, The Hague, 1763-4 (‘no. 53 Een dito portrait van prins Frederik Hendrik, een kniestuck, door of in de manier van A. van Dijk in dito [zwarte] lijst Hoogte 4 v ½ d. Breete 3 v 3 d [126.9 x 102.1 cm]’);¹…; collection Charles Howard Hodges (1764-1837); from whom, fl 100, to the museum, 1810;² on loan to the Ministry of Home Affairs, The Hague, 1915; on loan through the DRVK, 1952-2007; transferred to the States General, The Hague, since 1982

Object number: SK-A-105

The artist

Anthony van Dyck (Antwerp 1599 - London 1641)

Anthony van Dyck was baptized in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk, Antwerp, on 22 March 1599, the seventh child of a prosperous haberdasher. He died on 9 December (old style) 1641 in Blackfriars, London, and was buried two days later in Saint Paul’s Cathedral. By then he was internationally famous, and had to his credit an oeuvre of well over seven hundred paintings, consisting mostly in portraits, but also some highly esteemed sacred and profane figure subjects. He had outlived Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), who had greatly influenced him in his youth, by only some eighteen months, but he was to prove the more widely influential.

Enrolled as a pupil of Hendrik van Balen (1574/1575-1632) in 1609, he became a master in the guild nine years later before he was eighteen and a week before he received his majority – events perhaps connected with this father’s financial difficulties which had begun in 1615 and ended with the sale of the family house in 1620, having caused strife in the family. In the meantime, Van Dyck had entered Rubens’s studio, and had perhaps already operated unofficially as an artist working from a house in Antwerp called Den Dom van Ceulen. He was the only one of Rubens’s assistants to be named in the contract for the paintings for the Antwerp Jesuit Church signed on 22 March 1620.

There is no contemporary archival evidence for the existence of a studio functioning for Van Dyck before he left Antwerp for London and Rome. However, statements given in a lawsuit in Antwerp in 1660/1661 and the number of contemporary versions of some of Van Dyck’s works of that time would indicate at the least that there was a group of artists working in Van Dyck’s milieu, however informally.³

Van Dyck left Antwerp for London in October 1620; the purpose of his short visit – he was granted permission to leave at the end of the following February – is not known, but he received a payment from King James I (1566-1625) and was expected to return in eight months. He was recorded soon afterwards as living in Rome in the same house as George Gage (c. 1582-1632), an ‘Anglo-Catholic’ employed by the British crown to advance negotiations for the prince of Wales’s ‘Spanish match’ at the papal court.⁴

In Italy, Van Dyck was active in Rome, Venice, Genoa and Palermo.⁵ He re-established himself in 1627 in Antwerp. He was appointed court painter to the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, the Archduchess Isabella (1566-1633), and his practice extended to The Hague whence he was summoned on two occasions.

By the summer of 1632, Van Dyck had settled in London; he was knighted by King Charles I (1600-1649) and then granted an annual pension as a retainer. But in the spring of 1634, he was in Antwerp and by the end of the year he was living in Brussels. By March 1635 he had returned to London and was established in a studio, specially converted by the architect Inigo Jones (1573-1652), on the Thames at Blackfriars. In great demand, not only by the king as a portrait painter, Van Dyck mixed with members of the court and married in 1640 Mary Ruthven, who was of a Scots noble family. In the autumn of 1640 he was in Antwerp, and early in 1641 briefly in Paris whence he returned hoping to gain the patronage of King Louis XIII (1601-1643) and Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642). There in November, he wrote that he was very unwell; back in London with his wife for her lying-in, he died on 9 December (old style) shortly after the birth of his daughter, Justiniana.

References
S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, pp. 1-12

Entry

This painting is a copy after the portrait by Anthony van Dyck now in the Baltimore Museum of Art,⁶ which was first recorded in an inventory of the possessions of Amalia van Solms-Braunfels (1602-1675), the sitter’s widow, of 1673, and was probably painted in Antwerp following Van Dyck’s visit to The Hague at the end of 1631 and early 1632. There are two repetitions of this picture, in Madrid and Genoa, which Vey considers to be ‘almost – though not quite – equal in quality’.⁷ The present picture is, however, too weakly handled to be considered a work of Van Dyck’s studio in Antwerp. Rather it would appear to date from the second half of the seventeenth century, painted perhaps when the varnish on the prototype from which it was copied was already discoloured; as far as can be judged, the sash and helmet plumes should be a clearer orange.

The question then arises from which of the three pictures executed by Van Dyck, or under his supervision, the Rijksmuseum copy derives. It is larger than both those at Baltimore and Madrid, showing more at the top; its dimensions are closer to those of the Genoa version, where there is a similar amount of space above the sitter’s head. Larsen states that that picture was already owned by the Brignole-Sale in 1717, and that the family archives record that it was enlarged in the eighteenth century.⁸ Thus the similarity in format would appear to be coincidental. As the version in Madrid is probably the picture bought by King Charles I of Great Britain (1600-1649) in 1632, it seems likely that the Rijksmuseum picture was indeed executed as an enlarged copy of the Baltimore portrait before the latter left the Netherlands after the death of Amalia van Solms in 1675, when it was inherited by her daughter, Henriette Catharina, the wife of Prince Johann Georg II of Anhalt Dessau.⁹ What is likely to have been a copy of it, measuring about 127 x 102 cm, was listed in the Stadhouderlijk Hof, The Hague, in the inventory of 1763-64; and, as suggested in the provenance, that may indeed be the present picture, even if the dimensions are slightly smaller. If this is the case, it may have been painted as a replacement of the original when it left Holland.

Frederik Hendrik (1584-1647) was the third son of Willem I (1533-1584), Prince of Orange, and succeeded his half-brother as prince of Orange and stadholder of Holland, Zeeland, Gelderland and Overijssel in 1625. He was a very successful military commander seizing much territory from the Spanish controlled southern Netherlands. Van Dyck depicted him in his role of commander of the army of the United Provinces. Indeed he went on military campaigns in every year of his reign.

Gregory Martin, 2022

Literature

E.W. Moes, Iconographia Batava. Beredeneerde lijst van geschilderde en gebeeldhouwde portretten van Noord-Nederlanders in vorige eeuwen, 2 vols., Amsterdam 1897-1905, I, 1897, no. 2582:44

Collection catalogues

1880, p. 399, no. 469; 1905, p. 114, no. 858; 1976, p. 210, no. A 105

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'after Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of the Stadholder Frederik Hendrik (1584-1647), Prince of Orange, c. 1670', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6672

(accessed 26 May 2024 08:23:24).